being a good husband/friend
Catherine's away in Sussex (about 1.5-2 hours drive away) at the moment, on work. I was working from home today, and she phoned to say that she was ill - nothing life-threatening, but not at all well. I told her to go back to the hotel, and to bed, and offered to come down. She told me to stay where I was. Spoke to her again a bit later (she'd at least gone to bed), and she wasn't sounding any better. So I hopped in the car, which made me very popular indeed when I turned up at the hotel room an hour and forty-five minutes later. I'm home again now (she didn't fancy waking up extra early so that I could get to work near enough to 9am), but it's nice just to do the right thing from time to time. That's love, that is, and I feel happier knowing that she's not dangerously ill.

grip
Well, isn't grip better behaved with ide-scsi? Certainly is. The extra 512Mb of RAM may be helping, but the CPU usage seems well down, and I can now listen to oggs via XMMS and rip at the same time, and even get stuff off the modem(*), which is a huge improvement. Still a bit jerky typing from time to time, but that's all part of the fun. So, my recommendation is that you definitely run grip with ide-scsi (unless you already have a SCSI cdrom drive). Don't forget to add /dev/sg0 (or appropriate) in the config, and to give the appropriate group access to this device (generic SCSI).

(*)Note - after some experimenting, this bit turns out to be rather less true than I'd hoped...

interest rankings
These are new since I was last here. Interesting to see them in action. Important not to regard them as "I'm a good person" marks, of course. I was rather a karma wh*re on /. - until I got to 50, of course. So I'd better try to be sensible about them this time.

Independence Day
As a Brit, this is a bit of an odd thing for me (glad to let you have your independence, chaps, if that's the way you treat good tea, etc.). However, I recognise the importance of the day to Americans (USAmericans, that is), and it's sad to see that it's been spoilt by a shooting in Los Angeles airport. I hope that the rest of the day goes well, and safely.